Prof Julian Stallabrass

course description


Since the fall of Eastern European Communism, contemporary art has been radically transformed. With its Cold War role made redundant, the art world rapidly refashioned itself to serve the new interests of states and corporations, and to propagandise the virtues of globalisation. Biennials sprang up across the world from Korea to Senegal to Brazil, showcasing globalised contemporary art and inculcating its values into diverse local situations. At the same time, that art was altered as artists from the ‘developing world’, particularly China and parts of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, rose to prominence on the global arts scene. More recently, the principles of that cultural global ideal have come under pressure from the ‘war on terror’, and the consequences of the financial crisis.

This course will explore that transformation, and the contrasting theoretical, political and economic accounts of its causes. It will examine the possibilities for the exercise of the political in contemporary art, through case studies of artists such as Santiago Sierra, Martha Rosler, Xu Bing, Thomas Hirschhorn, Doris Salcedo and Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. It will also cover theories of the political in art by such writers as Fredric Jameson, Nicholas Bourriaud, Jacques Rancière, Paul Virilio and Coco Fusco, and more broadly recent views of political action itself by theorists such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou.

Throughout the course, we will look closely at critical and theoretical texts, as well as conducting a series of in-depth case studies, focusing on current exhibitions, artist lectures and visits to artists or curators. The course includes a study visit to a major biennial in the Autumn or Spring term. Students will be actively encouraged to develop their own research interests in the context of a seminar with a strong collaborative ethos.

language and other requirements


Standard entry requirements.  Those best suited to this course will have a good background in one or more of the following: history of contemporary art, theories of postmodernism and aesthetics, political theory, postcolonial studies and globalisation theory.

Course documents


You can get an idea of the form and subject matter of the course from this course description from the last time it ran, in 2010-11:
Aestheticising Politics Course Description 2010-2011